Peaeater

A tale recycled for Matt, the librarian.

There are a million stories in the naked psyche, and this is one of them.

Who are we, each of us, and what might we become, given the right stimulus? Bitten by a radioactive lamprey, victim of a faulty Dr. Zonk's Wacky Kemistry set, unwilling host to an extraterrestrial brain clam - any of these coincidences could mutate us into one of the Wonder Twins, with irrevocable changes to our credit rating. Once the need to wear tight 'n' bright underthings over things starts, it never lets go. This is how it happened to me.

I was working in the Manley P. Ketchwater Memorial Library, as I regularly did on Thursday afternoons, sorting piles of old rectal thermometry journals and wistfully imagining what it might be like to wear pantyhose with plenty of pepper, when a reverberating crash woke me from my reverie. Jumping up, I noticed smoke coming from the photocopier area. (5 cents per copy, please respect copyrighted material.)

Where there's smoke, there's fire! The journals! My mind raced furiously. What would Manley P. Ketchwater have done? Come up with a bold new vision statement and accompanying fundraiser campaign, that's what. Curse my weak grasp of bureaucracy!

I fell back on what I knew. I hawked up the wettest loogie my febrile lungs could produce, leapt the circ counter and hauled ass, ready to let fly at the first sight of flame.

The sight that met my eyes when I lurched to a halt was horrific. Smoke belched from a sizzling public access photocopier, its paper trays exploded outwards from the twisted wreck. The air was filled with the sound of its fritzing. Black toner had splattered in Rorschach nightmares all over the sensible oat-coloured carpet. But worst of all, and this I will never forget if I live to be a hundred, was the wild-eyed patron with his pants around his ankles, his hammy buttocks jammed into the document feeder. "What have you done!" I cried, hysterical. "Oversize materials are to be put directly onto the glass! For God's sake, get out of there, man!"

But the erstwhile butt prankster could only bulge his eyes pleadingly in my direction. He was trapped: a fleshy organ in the proverbial organ grinder. Before I even realized what I was doing, I drew my access override card from where it was holstered on my hip and lunged towards the hapless victim. Frantically I swiped the card through the slot again and again, until by some miracle the jam cleared, and Fatty rolled free.

That's when she blew.

With a deep vibrating thrum that I could feel in my teeth, the copier erupted,  the blast lifting me off my feet in a purple surge of supercharged photoelectric radiation. Blackness and pain seized me, the world swam dizzyingly out of focus, and I knew no more.

I came to, days later, to a different life. Oh sure, the burns healed, the bones set, the fragments of my teeth were dug out of the nearby oak shelving units and glued back together by amateur orthodontal enthusiasts and then trashed and new ones carved from narwhal ivory, but I was never the same again. The accident changed me. Somehow the energy discharged by that dying copier must have altered my molecular structure...

...is the explanation I came up with after a solid 15 minutes in the ready reference section. I had a duty now to use my super powers for good, to help the helpless, to answer any question no matter how inane, to exercise leadership in planning, implementing and promoting the preservation, organization and effective use of society's recorded information and ideas! *

And so by day, I continue to fool the world into thinking I am a mild-mannered librarian. But at night, when the doors close and the last Sidney Sheldon book has been returned to its place upon the shelf, then I become LIBRARIAN IN UNDERPANTS! Leaping from stack to stack! Ha haaaa!

And in the morning, when the staff come in, the chairs have been magically straightened, the cookery section mysteriously weeded, the science fiction and mystery paperbacks repaired with tape and sorted by author's last name!

Yes! It was I! The librarian, you fools!

But they will never know. So Mr. Soapes the night janitor found a pair of men's trousers draped over the microfiche. What does that prove? I'm a SUPER hero. It'll take more than a chilly run home over fences and through backyards to avoid the cops to stop ME.

* The latter being perhaps the finest blandest mission statement of any library school ever.